Practitioner Training on Roadmap Directives (2014-2015)

The HHC was a partner of Fair Trials International in the “Practitioner Training on Roadmap Directives” project, partially funded by the European Union. The overall objective of this project was to provide defence lawyers from various EU Member States with in-person training, written tools, and peer-to-peer support in order assist them in the effective use of EU criminal justice legislation – in particular, the Directives passed under the procedural rights Roadmap on (1) the right to interpretation and translation, (2) the right to information and (3) the right of access to a lawyer. In the framework of the project the HHC was responsible for contributing to designing the course, managing of the applications and selection of participants, preparing training materials and the practical arrangements related to organizing one of the training sessions held in Budapest.

Similarities and differences given in the jurisdictions of participants from Croatia, Slovenia and the Netherlands related to the implementation of the Directives were thoroughly discussed by the close to 40 criminal lawyers who attended the two-day training. The training encouraged the participating lawyers to use the Directives as legal tools in the courtroom in order to strengthen their arguments for the enforcement of the rights of defendants and fair trial guarantees. The workshop focusing on the implementation of the Directives in the Hungarian jurisdiction, which was moderated by the staff member of the HHC, provided an opportunity for the Hungarian participants to discuss their own practical experiences.

The report of the Fair Trials about the training is available here. For those, who seek to gain expertise in the practical aspects of the implementation of the Directives and the relevant case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice can find excellent online training courses of the Fair Trials here, and their relevant Practitioner Toolkits here.

The project was funded by the European Union.